Battlefield 6

The Game Room
1

Battlefield 6 launched yesterday and seems to be a huge hit with about 750,000 concurrent players on steam (which isn’t the only PC platform to get it from) which is a huge launch.

People are claiming it’s a return to form as a peak battlefield game comparable to BF3 and I think I agree. It’s modern day (technically 2027) so the weapons are pretty familiar though the story with the warring factions is a little silly – not that it matters. I think NATO vs Russia/China might’ve been more fun aesthetically and in terms of vehicles.

The game is beautiful, immersive, performs well, and is relatively bug free. A good launch. The maps have plenty of detail and the destruction is very good. There are a lot of game modes – the large modes include the classic conquest, breakthrough (sector by sector attack/defense) and escalation which is a variant of conquest I’m not sure about yet. Conquest and escalation are 64 players, I think breakthrough is 48. There’s a medium sized game mode (rush) and several smaller infantry focused modes like domination and what would be headquarters in Call of Duty, as well as a team deathmatch and a squad deathmatch (4 4-man squads in a free for all deathmatch).

I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. It feels good. I haven’t had much chance to unlock many gadgets or try different classes yet. But it’s full of aesthetically pleasing, immersive elements and chaotic destruction that works really well. There’s really nothing like it in terms of scale and immersiveness.

The squad system and flexible spawn system from previous battlefield games remains. One nice touch I really like is that when you’re reviving squadmates you can grab them by the collar and drag them to safety while you’re doing it. It looks cool and it’s useful.

My main complaint so far is that most of the modes/maps don’t have enough vehicles. They seem to want the game to be 90%+ infantry focused and so sometimes it feels like you’re running around playing a (better) call of duty infantry match with just an occasional armed transport or maybe an IFV. Conquest, which should be very vehicle heavy, isn’t for most maps. I have no problem having infantry focused game modes and maps, but it shouldn’t be as much of the game as it is.

Escalation seems to be the most vehicle-heavy of the modes. More vehicles are unlocked as the game progresses, so by the end it starts feeling like a proper battlefield game (2-3 tanks, 2-3 IFVs, transport helicopters, attack helicopters, attack jets, fighter jets, various transports) but that seems to be the only mode that consistently features a heavy vehicle presence. Conquest probably has a few vehicle-heavy maps that I haven’t had a chance to try yet.

I hate lock-on weapons in non-sim video games. It’s just boring gameplay to point in the general direction of a vehicle for 7 seconds until you get a tone, and if they have countermeasures it does nothing, and if they don’t it automatically hits them. I think that’s terrible gameplay. People should be using skill to shoot vehicles. But it’s not really any different in that regard from BF3/4. It’s just the worst aspect of the gameplay.

The sound seems pretty good but not as good as Battlefield 3 which had some of the best sound design in any game ever. I don’t know why if you put so much effort into creating such a great sound system / samples you don’t just keep using the same thing in sequels.

All of the Battlefield 5 trailers are kind of obnoxious but here’s the one I hate the least.

I’ll post more thoughts as I play more. If anyone is interested in playing together I’ll try to coordinate squads sometimes. Hit me up on steam (whether we’re already friends or you can find me on there, same name).

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I played the early Battlefields (1, 2, Bad Company, and Vietnam) and loved them. Spent hundreds if not thousands of hours between them. I am really intrigued by 5’s return to form. Doubly interested since it runs on 5080s with GeForce Now, and should be quite the visual feast.

But I’m a bit wary given EA’s imminent sale to the Saudis and Jared Kushner. On one hand, EA had been circling the drain for quite a while now and this might be the shock to the heart it desperately needed. On the other hand, those are not investors I particularly want to give money to, either ethically or in terms of how they structured the buyout. It’s gonna saddle EA with crazy debt, and BF6 is already nearly $100 with the cosmetics DLC… I shudder to think how they’ll enshittify it once the sale goes through :frowning:

Too bad DICE didn’t stay independent… I love the franchise but hate its owners… EA was already a shit company before, and it’s about to get a whole lot worse next year. Feeling conflicted, to say the least…

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Gonna give this a shot, I haven’t played since the very early ones. Been playing a lot of Marvel Rivals recently and aim is a very translatable skill so i should be fine.

4

For me there was the EA launcher bug which was bad (but seems to be sorted now) and the ALWAYS online requirement even in single-player which I just find annoying. My ISP is solid but the connection can be broken more places than just my ISP.

The game does seem a return to form though giving most of what players want and like with little to no BS like monetization (holding my breath on that but for now seems good).

I hope this is successful and they take a lesson from it on how to make a good game and not ruin it. Of course, now that EA has been sold I have almost no confidence in how well they will manage game development in the future. Time will tell, wait and see and all that.

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One plus for the Steam version of Battlefield 6 is that it doesn’t use the EA launcher, so while their own version of the game was bugged, the steam version was fine. If I recall correctly it integrates both your steam friends and EA friends (if you’ve linked your account) into the game although it never asked me to log into any EA account. Maybe it’s because I’ve linked my steam account in the past.

The Saudi Arabian thing is concerning and I wouldn’t blame anyone if they refused to buy any game by the company for ethical reasons. But so far I don’t see evidence of enshittification. The actual buyout doesn’t happen for another year and a half though that doesn’t mean that the influence won’t affect what EA does until then. I figure I’ll get enough fun out of it in the next few months to be worth the purchase price even if it does get affected by some negative new policies in the future.

Come to think of it, this is the first game I’ve bought for $60+ in a long time. I will sometimes buy $20-40 indie games at full price at launch but rarely will I buy a AAA game at launch, I prefer to wait till they’re cheap. I can’t remember the last time I actually did it. I bought Battlefield 1 at full price at launch but that was 9 years ago, surely that couldn’t be the last time… hmm.

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My one complaint so far are the maps being way too small. Everything else is fantastic.

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So there was a big content update for Battlefield including a new free to play Battle Royale called REDSEC that you can play even if you don’t own BF6. Ignore 90% of the bad reviews – they’re just people throwing tantrums over the fact that some of the weekly challenges for bonus XP are in the BR mode that they don’t want to play. I’m actually having a lot of fun with it so far. I haven’t played a BR in a few years so maybe I’ve gone back to where they feel a little novel but it’s a pretty nice map, runs well, has an interesting dynamic mission system.

I haven’t seen all the types of missions yet but you get a choice from missions available in your area. Some of them are more PVE oriented, like go here, grab this, go hack this place. But there are also dynamic PVP missions. For instance, one squad can accept a mission to hunt down a specific player, and then other players in the area are offered a survival mission where they have to evade that squad and stay alive for 3 minutes. Whoever completes the mission gets a cache of goodies with nice weapons, some call ins like UAV spotting and air strikes, and even a vehicle key so they can go find a tank or helicopter on another part of the map. Someone got a tank on my sector of the map and I was offered a mission to hunt down and destroy their tank. I don’t know how much the game copies from warzone because I never played it but the map mechanics feel similar to pubg or apex and the ability to respawn downed squadmates was like apex, but the vehicles and things like artillery and airstrikes feel pretty battlefield. They also harness the class identities into BR-relevant abilities that are a little different than the base game.

Missions are optional so you can play it as a straight battle royale game, but the rewards are pretty good so it’s definitely a risk/reward calculation based on where you are in the game, how many people are left, how good your equipment is, where are you on the map, etc. Overall I’m enjoying it quite a bit.

Other stuff they added to the game was a new map (which doesn’t seem very well balanced and turns into a sniper fest) and a new mode called strikepoint which is basically a 4v4 counterstrike style game on the battlefield maps which I like. They also added a battlepass with mostly cosmetic although I think you get access to two weapons that non battlepass users do not. I don’t know if they’re any good but that’s a little problematic, I prefer purely cosmetic battle passes.

I’ll post my thoughts about the game after playing for 2 or 3 weeks in a bit.

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Alright so after 3 weeks of playing the game quite a bit:

I’ve enjoyed playing it. I don’t regret buying it. There’s a lot good about it. It’s good looking, technically pretty good, the combat feels good, the spawn system/squad system is good, the classes, weapons, gadgets are good. There are 10 or 12 different modes to play at all different scales and they’re all fun. That’s a pretty big accomplishment.

But then I think it kind of feels like a worse version of Battlefield 3. That’s not the worst thing in the world because Battlefield 3 was one of the all time great shooters. But it doesn’t feel like there’s been much technical advancement since Battlefield 3. The graphics are a similar level of quality, other than the presence of smoke and particle effects which are more prevalent. Of course I haven’t actually played Battlefield 3 in 10+ years so maybe I’m misremembering the difference. But it doesn’t feel like a big generational leap over it. The destruction doesn’t seem any better or more technically impressive and I think Battlefield 4 might have actually been better, though that may be a map design issue rather than any technical limitation.

Battlefield 3 had much better map design. That’s Battlefield 6’s main flaw. It’s clear that they were going after some of the call of duty audience, so they made maps that were smaller, faster, more infantry dominated, and involved immediately running into action all the time to keep anyone from having 10 seconds of downtime or having to think about what they were doing. The maps are too small across the board. With 1 or 2 exceptions they feature too few vehicles. Infantry is 90-100% of the combat instead of 60-80% like a good battlefield game should be. The design of the maps is too constrained. It seems obvious that they’re trying to funnel people into preferred lanes between objectives in a similar way that call of duty does it, compared to previous battlefield games that gave you plenty of room to manuever and many ways to approach your objective. What’s especially obnoxious about this is that a lot of the maps have usable area outside of the designated in-bounds area that could simply become unrestricted and give the maps the breathing room they need, but they constrain the in-bounds area far too much to make sure people are forced into their (relatively) narrow lanes.

The plus side of this is that they’ve created a credible CoD style game that’s actually better than CoD. But the thing is – they could have it all. They could still have the smaller scale, infantry only or infantry focused modes like domination and king of the hill and even rush to have that call of duty feel while still giving us proper conquest and other large modes with wide open gameplay, large maps, and lots of vehicles. They just… chose not to.

There’s also far too many lock-on weapons and it makes for really stupid gameplay for aircraft especially. My favorite thing to do in battlefield games is to fly helicopters and I’ve done that about 5 minutes in my 40+ hours of play because for one helicopters are too rare, and for two they have an average lifetime of about 9 seconds. As soon as they go up, 10 different lock on weapons immediately target them. No one even needs to make a skillful shot to take them down, you just have to aim in the general direction and wait for it to beep a few times. It makes them pathetically weak and useless. To make things worse they made regular rifle and MG fire damage transport helicopters so the point where even if the enemy doesn’t bother to shoot 20 different lock on weapons at them, some guy with a machine gun can bring it down fast enough anyway. And there’s not really much purpose for using transport helicopters anyway because the maps are so small that you don’t need a quick way to ferry troops.

This could be the greatest battlefield game but they decided to forsake their core audience of conquest players using lots of vehicles on huge maps in favor of sort of a battlfield/call of duty hybrid. Which was completely unnecessary, given that their smaller scale COD style modes are already a completely credible COD replacement. They could’ve had 4 or 5 modes for that COD experience without having to cripple their large scale modes too. They could’ve easily had the best of both worlds and chose not to.

That said, it’s still fun and I’m still playing it a lot, but it handicaps itself for no reason and I wonder if I’m just enoying it because I haven’t played a battlefield game in a long time rather than that it’s superior to previous battlefield games.

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Thanks for that in-depth review! It was particularly the vehicular combat that I enjoyed of the previous Battlefields (especially the WW2 and Vietnam ones without the lock-on weapons)… too bad they changed that formula :frowning:

There are already so many infantry shooters (and battles royale, ugh). Wish they doubled-down on the vehicle stuff instead of diluting the formula and shrinking the maps…

I’ll probably still end up buying it if the Saudi sale doesn’t go through next year.

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If you’re interested you might find the Battle Royale to be interesting, at the very least it gives you a pretty good preview of the graphics/mechanics/shooting/etc of the game. I’m actually having a lot of fun with the BR/REDSEC more than I thought I would. In some ways it seems better than the base game – it’s a huge map with no constraints and the destruction is actually better than the base game. Of course the style is completely different. But it works. I haven’t had this much fun playing a BR since Apex about 6 years ago.

Edit: I hate that there’s no solo mode for the BR. It’s 2 or 4 players only. When none of my friends are around I’d much rather play alone than get stuck with a random. I think 100 solo players is the purest form of BR.

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So the free REDSEC component of BF6 doesn’t just have the battle royale but also a mode called the Gauntlet which I hadn’t tried when I wrote all that. It’s a series of matches where 8 squads of 4 players compete in a random sequence of about 10ish game modes with different objectives. After the first round, the top 6 teams advance (eliminating two), and then the top 4, top two, and then one team wins it all. Each round has a different objective based game mode like holding onto a beacon, competing to acquire and plant bombs in different parts of the territory, capture the flag type mechanics, etc.

It’s actually quite good. Most of the objective based modes are easy to pick up but interesting and varied enough to feel like a series of somewhat different challenges. The challenges take place on small chunks of the BR map. I think they could probably should add more map areas but that’s easy enough, they’re basically just designating small parts of an already existing map.

Since the REDSEC battleroyale/gauntlet component has a lot of the same things that make the game good (looks good, runs smoothly, good classes / gadgets / teamplay) and not the main drawback (bad map design), it’s entirely possible that a lot of people could think it’s better than the actual paid battlefield game itself. It lacks the large scale battles and a lot of the game modes in BF6, so I’m not suggesting it’s better across the board or replaces it, but it’s not just a half-assed cash in novelty mode that tries to ride alongside BF6’s popularity, it’s quite good in itself.

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As someone who prefers larger maps in general, has any FPS been made with total player populations on one map of c. 1,000 or so? Aside from the ancient title WW2 Online (which apparently is still lurching onward), I can’t think of one.

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Planetside 2? PlanetSide 2 - What is PS2?

It’s basically a sci-fi Battlefield-style MMO